odditudes-and-weirdities

My 6 calendars each have a different poster animal for January. Here's a summary. (Note that these calendars probably over-represent charismatic megafauna .) Defenders of Wildlife has gone with the Alexander Archipelago Wolf , a subspecies of Timber Wolf. I probably have a picture of a Vancouver Island Wolf, but there is reason to believe they should both be considered the same species. Coastal Wolf September 2021 Photo 161788080, (c) Marcie Callewaert John, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC) One of my Audubon calendars has gone with someone you can see here in NJ, the Black-capped Chickadee . This is our most widespread chickadee, though the (very similar) Carolina Chickadee is making inroads. Black-capped Chickadee January 3, 2018 at Corvallis, Oregon Photo 174938497, (c) macrhybopsis, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC) My other Audubon calendar has gone with the Florida Scrub-Jay , a species that is a candidate to be the Florida state bird. Florida Scrub-Jay December 2021 at Polk Cou...

Happy Rogue Wave Day!  Admittedly if you actually encounter a rogue wave , happiness might not be the feeling that you're experiencing, since they are a powerful and dangerous force of nature. Rogue waves are considered fairly common and extremely large waves for which we don't really understand the cause(s). They are waves run wild, as their name "rogue" suggests. They are not tsunami waves , which are caused by things like earthquakes suddenly displacing a lot of water. They also differ from tsunami waves in that tsunami waves are almost a non-factor in deep ocean water, and only cause trouble in shallow water or at the shore. On this date in 1995 the first rogue wave (the Draupner Wave ) was measured from a gas pipeline support complex in the North Sea. A wave 84 feet in height was detected. While larger waves have been measured since then, empirical evidence of waves this big got the attention of the scientific community. It's believed that we don't have a...